Notable Network and Cloud Outages of 2021 
Anycast Hosting Made Easy 
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) Internet Load Balancing and Failover for Multiple ISP Links
Controlling traffic is a key facet of internet management. Sometimes primary connections will go down. Or too much traffic may cause congested links or overwhelmed devices to become unusable. We wrote about the implementation of load balancing in the cloud in a 2017 blog post. When people think of load balancing, they usually think about traffic that […]
HTTP/2 Makes the Internet Faster
If you have ever worked on a farm or have done construction, you probably got used to carrying things. And you might have heard your supervisor say at some point, “Get it all in one trip if you can.” That’s the idea behind HTTP/2. Earlier versions of HTTP required multiple TCP streams to transfer the […]
Selecting the Right Monitors for Your Website
Suppose you’ve just launched a new website and you want to make sure that everything keeps working fine. What’s the next step? You could just hope and pray, but there is merit to being more proactive than that. The responsible thing to do is to monitor your website, including all the critical pages, services, and […]
Redundancy: When Too Much is Just Right
Redundancy is indispensable in the world of information technology. Of course, redundancy is not welcome in every aspect of life. If your company doesn’t need you anymore and makes you “redundant”, you’ll have to look for another job. Poorly written text may be credited to the Department of Redundancy Department. The concept of redundancy is […]
Does the Cloud have a Layer 1 or Layer 2?
Your customer calls the hotline and reports an outage. Now what? Well, first we need more information. What’s down? When did it go down? Were there any changes that may have affected it? Have other customers reported outages that may be related? We can’t possibly cover all the issues here. So let’s consider a specific […]
Hybrid Cloud. Hybrid IT. Hybrid Availability.
There is a lot of talk about hybrid these days when it comes to IT. For the past five years or so, the Hybrid Cloud has been a hot topic as organizations are now open to hosting their digital services and data beyond the walls of the datacenter perimeter. Recently, the new approach of managing […]
Load Balancing Moves to the Cloud
Everyone in the IT business has heard of load balancing, but many don’t know much about it. Even technology professionals who are familiar with the concept may know little about how it works. A brief introduction to the subject of load balancing and its development will help to round out our IT education. Why Load […]
The Coming Revolution of Software Defined Networking
Roughly, a decade ago, VMware released their ESX virtual hosting platform that literally changed the datacenter, as we know it. It came at a time when datacenters were inundated with server sprawl as every new application request resulted in the purchase, racking and configuration of a new server. The arduous hardware purchasing process for servers […]
Does Convergence Impact Uptime?
One of the biggest trends in data center infrastructure is convergence. Actually it has been happening for some time. Equipment footprint has been getting smaller for years. Functions that used to be handled by huge dedicated machines are now accomplished by modular cards. Specialized servers, switches, routers, and other network devices have been combined into […]
Website Down? Understanding Why
“The website is down again!” That can be pretty frustrating. In the heat of the moment, most of us don’t really care why it is down — we just want back online. But the curious user may want to know more. What could make a web server unreachable? Why do they go down in the […]